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Excavation reveals life in the seventies no picnic

Richard Glover

MY ADOLESCENCE, and maybe yours, is now the subject of an archaeological dig. No really. An archaeologist in Britain, Lisa Hill, is digging up a disused camping area in the Forest of Dean, collecting evidence of what life was like in the late 1970s.

She's interested in using archaeological techniques, like those used to unearth the antiquities of Rome, to gain an insight into life 30 or 35 years ago. Quoted in The Times, she said: “I am very interested in the 20th century and I wanted to discover what traces such an ephemeral activity as camping would leave behind.”

For years I've felt like an old historical ruin but this is the first time anyone has tried working me over with a pick and shovel. Well, chaps, you can stop digging. All you need to know about the campsites of the late 1970s is right here in my memory bank.

First, the tent. It would be small and nylon; supplied in a pouch so tiny the various parts could never fit back into the bag. Instead, you'd store the tangled mess in the boot of the car, thus losing several crucial pieces.

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The tent would then be erected, usually in high winds, using one pole, three pegs and a leftover octopus strap. The result was not always attractive to the eye.

“You promised me a romantic weekend under canvas,” said my prospective girlfriend, “not two days sleeping in mud in a nylon humpy.”

Camping, though, was not without creature comforts. An environmental warrior before my time, I had invested in what was marketed as a “solar shower”. This was a large plastic bladder, with one side painted black. I left it in the sun all day, occasionally moving it to capture the winter rays. Then, as dusk came, I hung the thing from a tree branch and invited the prospective girlfriend to remove her clothing. Thus she was able to experience firsthand the remarkably freezing water provided by this incredibly crap invention.

Her complaints about the poor facilities forced me to focus her attention on the fine dining experience that lay ahead — one that would make up for all the troubles so far.

The year was 1979, which was before chefs had invented cooking terms such as “rare”, “medium rare” or even “well done”. The only available setting for any sort of meat was "nuclear holocaust".

So I built a large campfire, generating the sort of heat last experienced during the bombing of Dresden. Cringing from the acrid smoke, I threw two generously proportioned T-bone steaks in the vague direction of the conflagration, at which point they were consumed by the flames.

Here lies an important reminder for Lisa Hill: what she may interpret as signs of a cult of animal sacrifice alive and well in the 1970s is more likely the result of an insistence on a “really properly cooked steak”.

With the steak impossible to locate in the leaping flames and a fire too hot for further cooking, dinner became a can of cold baked beans, eaten straight from a metal cup. It was then time to retire to the tent.

My prospective girlfriend (oh, all right, it was Jocasta) warily approached the poorly constructed tent. “An inadequate erection,” she mumbled, as she lifted the tent flap, “no doubt the first of many.”

Inside, the tent was equipped with a blow-up sleeping mat. Mysteriously, all sleeping mats in the 1970s were manufactured in Bulgaria. I called mine the Bulgarian Torture Mat. It could be left underinflated, in which case every rock in the Great Dividing Range would accumulate beneath your left hip, or it could be fully inflated, in which case it would form a series of hard ridges, like sleeping on a sheet of corrugated iron.

Why were they always manufactured in Bulgaria? I can only guess they reused the rubber truncheons with which they beat their political prisoners. Or perhaps it was their revenge on the West, a previously unrecorded battleground of the Cold War. “Let's make them so uncomfortable they cannot have sex and reproduce,” one Bulgarian general would muse to another, “then we shall invade.”

Yet we, the Australian men of the 1970s, had methods to defeat the Bulgarians. Not only was the tent incredibly small, it was also common to dig a drainage ditch along one side. Thus your female companion faced a choice: either grab hold of you in some sort of intimate clinch or tumble into the ditch.

From a contemporary point of view, it may seem strange that the sexual spark of the 1970s could only be ignited by the construction of such complex earthworks. I can only remind you of the deeply unattractive nature of the menfolk of the 1970s. You try getting in the mood when the object of your affection is sporting desert boots, novelty underpants, a tie-dyed T-shirt and a mullet cut.

Still, somehow, romance occasionally bloomed: a Bulgarian torture mat, a length of flapping nylon and young love. Dig for your life, Lisa. The glories of Rome have nothing on this.

'An inadequate erection,' she mumbled, as she lifted the tent flap, 'no doubt the first of many.'